Plant Spirit Shamanism: the Medsen Fey
Loulou Prince is a medsen fey (leaf doctor/herbalist and shaman) in Jacmel, a small Haitian town close to the border with the Dominican Republic. In his daily practice, he deals with a range of health problems typical of the area – from aches and cuts and bruises symptomatic of the hard toil in the fields through which most of his patients make a living, to sufferers of more serious complaints such as HIV and AIDS, a disease as prevalent in Haiti as in other Third World countries.
“Ours is a spiritual tradition which traces its lineage to the shamans of primal Africa, which we call Gine”, said Loulou. “It blends together a number of African beliefs with elements from other faiths, such as Catholicism, the religion of the French slave traders who took the shamans and priests of Africa to this new world of the Caribbean.
“The lwa are the spirits who travelled with us from Africa. They come to us through a trance where the healer is ‘mounted’ by the lwa – or through their appearances in our dreams”.
Both of these ways of working with the spirits are present in the healing practices of the medsen fey, who is at an expert herbalist and a shaman, inspired by the spirits in his choice of healing herbs.
“The medsen fey is a person who knows how to talk to the lwa and to use leaves and other plant parts to promote health and cure illness”, says Loulou. “Many of us also have personal or family lwa who also help us in our work”.
This latter point is interesting. The ancestors – the family of lwa known as ‘zanset yo’ – are a powerful healing force and every healer will have developed a close relationship with his own